I can't say I've been working on it as long as you, seven years is my own time spent on it to date, but I come from the professionally qualified STEM community, now finding the time I've spent on this project, the most I've spent on any project, including projects up the value of 20Bn historically, has cost me a lot personally, including probably my reputation amongst former STEM peers. I call it the global energy problem, that we might say has a similar solution to the one you are suggesting. My specialism is Systems Engineering. I started on this from PhD candidate work, realising that a sustainable digital twin was needed in order for me to complete the research I was doing on a future VR/AR product at the time, but more, since the problem standing in the way of the sustainable VR/AR world also stands in the way of the real physical world, its something that needs to be fixed in the real physical world, before there can be any sustainable digital twin.
The problem I see, which has affected pretty much every effort we've seen to create metaverses, virtual worlds, digital twins, whatever, is energy flow. If the energy for a platform has to be derived from its users by revenue extracted from users, as it is in all cases to date, then the platform is unsustainable, because the energy for the users in that case has to come extracted from the planet, and look, this extraction is pushing up the global temperature ever faster now, its at flashpoint, we can't afford to keep pushing it further. It's the energy extraction which is unsustainable, and I don't just mean fossil fuels, I mean the energy gained every time we take something from the planet which has has more energy in it than we do in work to take the resource, with the result that the planet loses more in energy than it gained from us. I other words, every time we make energy profit from the planet, without putting back what we took out, and since what we took was not heat, but we ultimately convert it mostly to heat, this is direct increase of entropy and therefore temperature rise.
The problem I see with mainstream science, is that it too has become dependent on profit, so it now has a massive conflict of interest, which actually warps the objectivity of all of science, in a way that makes it more or less impossible for many people to see outside the for-profit mentality. This results in problems being very literally unfixable, since there is no way to make profit after a problem is fixed, what we have become accustomed to doing, is treating symptoms, rather than fixing problems, and even then we only do when its profitable, and now we even make up problems that don't exist, to create profitable companies that appear to be working on something useful, when actually its just bullshit business, to make some profit.
I call this imaginary world we live in, creating bullshit business, which is always dependent on extracted energy, Enshittopia.
There is obviously much more to this, its the product of seven years of work using all the tools of formal systems Engineering to analyse, I can barely scratch the surface in a reply like this, but I hope you see how our efforts might be complementary.
To me failure is not an option, because we really are going to lose the planet and all future, if we can't sort this problem out, and if we know where to look, we see this problem being sorted out by nature all the time, so there is not really any reason to think we won't do the same. However it could be very expensive, in terms of life, if we don't do what we can to make it happen soonest.
The solution to me starts with solar indexed stimulus. This is the only way to get the energy from the sun into the economic system. That done, will provide endless valuable energy product, which will empower us, all of us, no exceptions, to do everything needed.
But it means the end of profit, we will have to come up with some new rules preventing that, because profit is extracted energy, no matter how we try to cut it, even if the solar energy is supplied to the public via utilities energy companies at profit, this still ties us into extraction, the damage from which has to always outweigh the creative work done by the energy of the sun.
Anyhow, sorry long reply, but as you probably know, I still only scratched the surface.
